I'd wager political topics lead to emotionally charged, intellectually devoid arguments (much) more commonly than others.

This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion.

Part of the beauty of HN is getting opinions about things that matter in the real world, from people who really think about things.

> This may be partly because so many thoughtless people feel qualified to enter a political discussion (e.g., about basic income, or immigration), whereas they couldn't even pretend to understand real-time operating systems or functional programming enough to have an opinion.

That's not what the parent comment said. They only claimed "pretend to understand politics -> easy", "pretend to understand specific advanced tech -> hard", "HN is great, because comments mostly come from people trying to understand things".

You jumped to conclusion about what "matter in real world" actually means that wasn't in the comment.